Scent Notes | Boisé by Patyka

By Chandler Burr January 9, 2009 12:08 pmJanuary 9, 2009 12:08 pm

I have little patience for bio/organic perfume collections, and perhaps less for the people behind them because, to give the most fundamental reason, the perfumes usually smell inferior. For example, I have never really understood (the diplomatic term for “liked”) a single Strange Invisible Perfume scent despite great effort on my part and the sincerity and hard work of its founder. Most organic lines offer various versions of woody mushroom. In fact, I would have told you that a good all-organic was impossible, but I would have been wrong. Recently, Red Flower somehow managed it. Now Patyka proves me wrong again.

Founded by Philippe Gounel, its creative director, and devised by Patyka’s in-house perfumer, Jenny Corless, the organic skin-care and fragrance brand was introduced in the United States in 2005. Patyka’s philosophy makes an immense deal out of being organic and natural, its raison d’être and its political cause. As for its aesthetic approach, Patyka’s is, interestingly, a collection of scent paradigms. All six of its perfumes (originally there were also a floral and a fougère-fern, which have, sadly, been discontinued; I’d be very interested to smell them) bear the names of basic perfumery classifications: Hepéridé (citrus perfumes), Chypre, Boisé (woody) and Ambré (amber; ambers are all built on vanilla and patchouli). In one sense, this is a weakness. Take Ambré, for example. Corless and Gounel have created an absolutely classic amber. Like Escoffier’s basic béchamel sauce, this could be used in perfume classrooms as a model, a sort of scented phylogenetic common amber ancestor. Creativity, innovation, zero — but Ambré is very, very nice, creamy as malted milk and smoothed with vanilla.

Before getting to the other perfumes, let’s do the (huge) caveats. First, fundamentalism is reprehensible no matter what form it takes, including PETA and the all-organic fanatics, and there is no scientific reason whatsoever to spit on synthetics, which in his suave French way Gounel unfortunately does. Why do it? It might be good marketing. It might (to be much more charitable) come from an honest desire to care for the planet. But it’s not rational. For one, perfume is not a food; it’s art, and scent raw materials don’t need to be natural any more than do paints. For another, to get geraniol (a gorgeous molecule, green/lemon/rose/fresh) you can grow, then destroy, tons of geranium plants, or you can simply build geraniol in a lab; the molecules are identical, but the synthetic is pure and takes less out of the earth.

Then there’s this question of what is natural. Due to newish E.U. regulations, all perfumes must list known allergens (perfumers have to limit the amounts of these they use in formulas). Patyka packaging lists limonene (found in lemon), citronellol (geranium) and linalol, all of which is fine, except: a) all can be synthesized without taking a toll on the soil, and b) natural linalol is mostly extracted from rosewood, which is going extinct; by not using synthetic linalol, Patyka is contributing to this. (Of course, every time you peel an orange you get more limonene on your hands than in an entire bottle of perfume; some of Europe’s rules are absurd as well.) Benzyle benzoate is found in ylang ylang; because the perfumes contain ylang, they include this molecule, which is an allergen; because Patyka doesn’t believe in the technology that would purify the ylang of this allergen, the allergen goes into the Patyka perfume.

Oh, and the box lists “parfum.” Huh? What does that mean? Everything is “parfum,” an umbrella to hide any number of possible sins.

But all this said, these are four extremely nice perfumes. I dare say wonderfully so. Hespéridé is an absolutely delightful, pure sunlit lemon high on a hill in Sicily. It is a perfectly balanced citrus, which is hard to do, a feeling of both crisp clean and relaxed bliss. I would bet this stuff is more effective than Paxil. The Lauders and LVMHs should take note of Chypre, which masterfully transports the genre’s progenitor, the 1917 Chypre de Coty, into the 21st century, a satin scarf of oak moss and eugenol (gentle spice) and dusky, clear bergamot and bitter orange. (I never comment on packaging, but the packaging here is just too perfectly done not to.)

Perhaps the best is Boisé, a terrific, accessible, stylish wood. No cedar pencil shavings of Gucci Homme, no smoke, no fussiness of Feminité du Bois nor the contemporary cool of He Wood, Boisé is a friendly, warm feather bed of a wood fragrance. It is also the only one that lasts on skin. This is the other problem. Because there are no synthetics, which are technologically much higher performing, you’re paying a hundred bucks for perfumes that vanish in five minutes (Hespéridé) or 20 (Ambré) or 40 (Chypré). Which is why those are two-star perfumes. A scent simply must last to be truly great. Yes, reapplication is an option, but Patyka will make it constant, and you will need more than a little patience. These perfumes are as evanescent as happiness. But, boy, in the brief time that they last, they are just wonderful, and you are so happy.